When She Was Queen

by M G Vassanji

  How tenderly beautiful did my little arachnid look, once upon a wedding night in Karachi, delicate and fragile, her face pink and rouged, lips red and full, puckered Madhuri-like, white sari sequinned, the end going over the black hair. O piece of the moon, my heart sang, she was full and ripe, ready to be plucked—fucked—and I did just that. I drew blood. Only, she took two decades and four kids before she stung back, this pro-lifer, drew all the money from our accounts and fled with Pious Ayub. And left me with this freak. Nature’s chromosomically slight deviation from the template labelled “normal.”

  Freak, but how tender and human, how loving he can be … when those fragile arms go around the neck and he clings, and how sensitive to hurt, and what a laugh and mischief, what embodiment of life. As if sensing I was the one who would have terminated his gestation, he’s reserved his devotion for me. And his mother, who had insisted on having him, finally abandoned him to me and absconded.

  Yes, it’s still October, my angel, but just…. How you tug at my heart, how I wish you had had a semblance even of normalcy in your life—a reasonably happy home, McDonald’s and Gerrard Street and Wonderland, Centre Island, monopoly and cards, and baseball, and holidays out of town. But for you it was wrong from the word go; and you yourself didn’t add up.

  Child, child….

  The last of the teenage louts stomp away from the front door disappointed, dragging their sacks full of goodies. The jack-o’-lantern on the porch has flickered out. A fat but not full moon slides through wispy clouds this cold night. The last of the maple leaves hang limply from their trees. The quiet houses of this lovely, traditional street exude cosy warmth through their windows.

  Yes, a beautiful street of old English-style red-brick houses with sloping roofs and bay windows, hung over with grizzled maples. As in the storybooks; you should see it after a snowfall. She would have preferred new!-new!–new! and faraway, closer to the North Pole, a dream mansion in a brand-new development, with houses six deep and saplings planted on the sidewalks hopefully to give shade in two decades, by which time the area would be overrun by neo-Nazis, Jamaican warlords, and the Russian mafia. She didn’t object past the first demurral—there’s status to living in an all-white neighbourhood, provided you don’t let on about the unnerving experiences. Those little slights that are almost not there; but they are. Soon after we moved in, as we unloaded groceries in the driveway, a guy walked past saying, How did you find yourselves here? Same way as you, sucker, I shouted back, we’re here and we’re taking over. Fat chance, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say just that. Meanwhile our three were the only brown kids in school, besides one black and one half-Japanese. Try that for comfort. Try telling the kids they’re not white, not better than black nor worse than anyone else. And the neighbours, a reserved kind, the stiff-upper-lip sort—at least as far as we’re concerned; because when a white couple moved in three months after us, the whole street came up to shake hands with them and kiss their blue-eyed angels, these Ontarian patriots come to defend the Anglo fort. But so what? These enclaves have to be broken in, neutralized, multiculturalized. That argument is similar to the one I used for bringing into our home a Christmas tree: let’s make the tree ours! She wouldn’t have it. But what do we have that’s so festive? I demanded. We have Eid, but what fun is it anymore? Christmas is in the air we breathe, as once Eid and Diwali were. Let’s move then, she insisted, to somewhere where we have people and can celebrate our festivities. No. No, no, no! Give satisfaction to these stuck-up prigs, these escapees from 1776, and freedom, these British-but-Americans? Give satisfaction to him, the single-handed destroyer of my career?… upon whom, however, the angel of death is moving in, as he did against the Egyptians….

  Hi, Jim, I said, having plucked up courage, running into him outside Loblaws, next to the bank machine and the Chinese flower shop. On his arm a ravishing young woman … long blonde hair, stylish winter jacket, tight jeans. (Wild, roving eye I still have, can’t help that.) Looked like his daughter. He, too, in dashing ski jacket, red and grey. They towered over me, both of them—and hurried straight past. He without even a flicker of a greeting, though she sized me up for an instant, must have asked him about me later. On my lips, my unspoken greeting, frozen: Guess we’re neighbours now! That snub hurt so badly. Why did I have to bother, but then what do you do when you run into a guy from the Department whom you see every day at work. Someone with influence. A few minutes later they returned (I was still at the bank machine) followed by an assistant carrying a Christmas tree. They had it put in the back of their Volvo station wagon and drove off.

  Jim Burton, the man who shot down my ambition early in my career, now spurning me in the street, brushing off my existence as if I were some kind of street Arab (isn’t that the expression?) when I made that first gesture at some kind of new beginning between us. We’re neighbours now. I moved into his area, though on a modest street, in a modest house. Perhaps he didn’t see me, saw someone else. How could I have moved into his area? Through painstaking work and scrounging, that’s how. By grinning and bearing it at work, playing the Indian Sambo.

  But twenty years ago … I still had a dream. And I will never forget that scene when, naive, scared, defenceless, I got crushed underfoot like a miserable cockroach—

  Your project is good, excellent in fact, and your grades are remarkably good, considering you did your undergraduate studies in … er … somewhere else. Mysore, India, I put in. Ah, that explains that—Notwithstanding all that, your speech and manner of presentation … does not justify granting of a doctorate … not yet… don’t you agree Looks around at his committee of cronies. What do you expect, of course they agree. Sorry and all that.

  Anyone else would have granted me my Ph.D., but this nigger in the woodpile, this fly in the ointment, this pain in the ass—tall and dashing, Viking-like, the well-mannered senior professor whom I had venerated—turned them all against me. Manner of presentation—accent, you mean. Foreignness. Brown. Indian. Granting me a doctorate and allowing a brown face among their bleached selves, that’s what put a chili up their ass. But, said our Viking, offering a sop, a master’s with honourable mention, that you surely deserve. And we can offer you a job, with your expertise, that of a technician. Read: slave. A dead-end job as a white-coated jack-of-all-trades technician, non-union errand boy, reserved for all those desperate and too-timid immigrants from the East.

  With your expertise…. I could teach them a thing or two, and he knew it. That’s why he kept me on to do his experiments, and for twenty years I remained at his beck and call, the invisible hand behind his published successes. Well, Jim. Dr. Burton, watch out for a taste—a tastelessness!—of my next experiment!

  The effects of toxins on babies is, of course, my specialty. Mouse babies only, so far. And dispatching them after the experiments. If I’d had my way I’d have dispatched this child too, now desperately trying to go to sleep on this Halloween night … though once he was born the two of us became thick as thieves, as close as can be, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do for this tender soul whose Xs and Ys don’t match up.

  An X from the mum and a Y from the dad; that’s how you make a boy. That’s the instruction baby factories of the future will carry in their foremen’s manuals, under MALE BABIES. One X or Y too many or too few and you have a deviant and the choice to abort. In our case, there was one X too many. A 47 baby boy. Midnight’s child. What does this mean, doctor? There is a good chance that your child’s sexual organs will not fully develop. For example…. Like, how? The testes may not develop and the ability to procreate—well, he will never be a biological father. But he’ll be a boy—male? Yes … the stature will be smallish, but in most cases he will be a normal child—there’s a lot you can do with postnatal—that’s after-birth—therapies. And—to abort? The choice to abort is entirely yours (you can tell where her sympathies lie, and she eyes the mother, gauging reaction)—if you want, I can refer you to the terminations department. What kind of po
stnatal treatment—I press on—can the child be normal? For the first few years there will be regular consultation with physicians and surgeons … and as for normal, it all depends on what you mean by normal. But what exactly can go wrong, what are the statistics? I’m afraid the statistics are only now being compiled, and we don’t have enough—the condition has only recently been understood, with more and more genetic testing before birth. (You mean in the past people accepted the babies they got and blamed deformations on God—and laughed at the freaks and teased them no end and gave them nicknames.) What else … can go wrong with the baby? the mother asks, for the first time. A look in the eye of the doctor, a call for a straight answer, to wit: Such conditions tend not to live beyond eighteen or so. But of course—

  You’re an expert at removing babies from their mothers’ wombs, aren’t you—she taunted, referring to my experiments on mice embryos under supervision of mein führer Jim Burton.

  What was there to say? We accepted the child that God had decided to give us.

  What God? The wife looked at me in horror when I uttered this blasphemy. From then on it was downhill all the way for the two of us. But the little boy became mine, and she lost interest in him.

  Now she’s gone off with Pious Ayub, having cleaned out all our savings, and I sit here on Halloween night keeping watch over my beautiful little monster. My jigger—liver as they used to say, my heart, my khoon, my blood, my soul, my everything. You know I love you. But I’ve reached my end, and without me you’re nothing.

  I remember Shanta Behn so clearly, every day these past few days she’s grown clearer in my mind … the pale white face and long pigtail reaching down to her waist… now that I think of it she would have been in her twenties. The flip-flop slippers and the saris, thin but wide at the hips … does a sexual image form?—hard to say, but she must have been attractive and deeply unhappy, every day she’d come to the shop to buy groceries and Dad, he must have eyed her and picked his crotch as he was wont to do, absentmindedly as it were—Mum was wide-hipped too but fat, a waddling shrew. But one day Shanta Behn tied her two daughters to her waist with a length of sisal rope and set herself aflame. And I never forgot Shanta Behn, right up to that wart over the cheekbone, and those large, deep kohl-black eyes and yes, a faint odour of spices….

  But you will not go alone, my son, you will not go unnoticed. You will exit with fanfare, you will make a noise. Even now I hear their screams, I hear my old nemesis Jim howling somewhere in the night, I hear an ambulance….

  Work, poison, work. Like Asrael, mark out the Egyptians’ homes and punish them. For their haughty arrogance and their hoity-toity racism. Work, poison, and lay out their pink babies in a row of death, like so many toxified mouse embryos.

  After all, how many people can actually go beyond hopelessness or uncontrollable rhetoric or frustration and actually achieve vengeance—cold and exact retribution, risking all. Not just failure, arrest by those gun-toting wide-belted protectors of the white and rich; but risking all eternity, like Azazel. (What was Azazel before he defied, risked all? A nonentity, fairy. Now he’s the equal of that vain Braggart.) It’s only when you risk all that a shudder runs down your spine, your hair stands on end: you are alone and there is no God; no heaven and no hell. Rules are made by the powerful who demand you play by them. Reality is the world they have created, laws are what keep you from changing the rules. So it was in the time of the pharaohs; and so it is now. Except for those who strike out where they can. I’ll show you! Yes, you have to show them. Else you become like one of those cartoon-caricature television Indo-Pakistanis….

  Irony is not wanting in my little drama, this playlet that will unfold into tragedy, so that perhaps the American president, the UN Secretary-General, and Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Tutu might feel compelled to issue statements of sympathy. The irony is that the ruin that is about to fall upon the House of Burton will have issued via the agency of the man he ruined and humiliated using the chemical agent he’s world famous for, which he’s used to destroy (through the agency of that same ruined, humbled man) hundreds of frightened mice and more than a thousand wriggling pink fetuses, all in order to trace the path of an amine poison in an organism (and to write dozens of technical papers and win a membership in the Royal Society). What perfect geometry, what fearful symmetry in this vengeance—it has to succeed if only because of this. Nature loves simplicity—A. Einstein.

  And nature seeks its own agents to execute its precise plans? The future is preordained; events lead one from the other, logically, easily—as the winds move, the moisture gathers, the rain falls—and destroys a village. And the earth goes merrily along, the seasons change, to every thing turn….

  The perfect geometry existed, unrevealed. Dr. Burton gets another hefty grant from his peers, requests me to start work with that most potent of poisons, a nitrosamine, which had been my subject of study, a decade and a half ago when I still had a dream. The poison is kept on the top shelf of an overhead cabinet secured with a—guess what?—padlock! Not only can a padlock be cut with pliers, the latch to which it is attached can simply be broken by a twist of the padlock, or—you’ll never believe this—unscrewed! Not only that, I have a key to the padlock. Talk of fate, talk of temptation, talk of revenge!

  Come Halloween, end of October, and the perfect sequence of events reveals itself, a diamond glowing in the dark. A diamond, recall, possesses perfect crystalline-clear symmetry.

  And so toffee and chocolates, gum, gobstoppers, gummi bears, fruit drops, sour balls … and that new craze of designer yuppie children with pinchable cheeks and smooth hair and bright clothes and their perfect parents: the psychedolipops, also a favourite of that old Viking Jim Burton and his two grandkids, Scottie (boy) and Campbell (girl), by that golden-haired, lanky lass (Jemima). All these candies get coated by that tasteless monster of a poison—and trick and treat.

  But now I can hear an ambulance—or two—and something’s bound to have happened…. O Asrael, you’ve done your rounds, now come and take these hands and let me end October here for this child. His eyes must watch me as I press down the pillow: that, after all, is my ultimate judgment… my hell… how frail and willingly he comes, how trustingly he subsides—oh, God.

  And now the sour balls for this loser, a sweet and sour death.

  No, Jim, I did not go through with it; at least not at your end. Evil does not have to be punished; and mercy, noticed.

  Elvis, Raja

  I.

  Ah-one ah-Two ah-body in the country jail…

  That’s how we always heard it, way back when, and scratched our heads, confused—what’s “nix, nix”? and what kind of name is Shifty Henry, anyway? And “getting kicks”?

  Seven young people in black pants and white T-shirts and slicked hair doing nifty things on a stage, with wooden chairs and a gymnastics crossbar and a horse, to the sound of “Jailhouse Rock.” A black student with a white-painted face stands holding a whip over a white student with blackened face, who’s bent over a chair, clutching the seat, and is evidently a girl. She undulates and gyrates her taut shapely body, mouthing silent cries of pain or ecstasy every time the tip of the riding crop reaches out and caresses her bottom. To the far right a character in gym shorts and undershirt continuously pummels a punching bag; another character in jeans and jacket, boots and cowboy hat, broodingly stalks the stage for something, oblivious of the others, as if belonging to yet another, superimposed tableau. “Flaming Star,” Diamond mutters to himself, identifying the latter scene. Rusty always knew all the Elvis stuff, movies and songs, as I did once, only I chose to outgrow and forget them. I never quite forgot, did I; though Rusty seems to have thrived on Elvis.

  A long time ago Diamond and Rusty had arrived, shy freshmen, one from Nairobi the other from Bombay, to study in New York. But the world was on fire and soon there they were in long hair and new jeans, screaming, “Off the pigs!” with all the other students protesting against the Vietnam War, and “Ho Ho Ho Chi Min
h!” Yet back in his Elvis-postered room late in the evenings, there would be Rusty behind his desk completing his homework, his idol’s songs playing on the stereo. One night an angry student radical clad in boots stormed in—while Elvis sang about a Chicago ghetto—and vented rage on Rusty’s precious record collection, flinging it down on the floor, stamping on the black vinyl discs like they were cockroaches until they cracked. Grief-stricken Rusty shed many tears, and the following days scoured the city for all those old LPs and EPs he had lost.

  Was it okay to stop over here, Diamond asks himself. We were friends once. We learned the ropes here, in this country, together. He tasted my first root beer for me and assured me it was not alcoholic; I cooked for him weekends, sometimes, chicken à la king and Salisbury steak and sloppy joe from plastic packages that you had to put in boiling water for three minutes. A few weeks after they met, they vowed to each other to have white girlfriends. An embarrassing memory. Why not just American girls or even black girls, since we so ardently supported the Black Panthers? But we came from the colonies and white is what we had to have, once. After graduation they had separated, and then a few years ago he had run into Rusty on a downtown street in Toronto. It was a couple of days after Christmas and Rusty was in town for an MLA conference. They had exchanged addresses, phone numbers, then failed to follow up on their lukewarm promises. He could have asked Rusty to come over for a coffee or a drink, but it was a busy period, his in-laws were in town, Sue’s parents. Also, Diamond had felt a bit embarrassed: here was Rusty, a professor, and he, Diamond, an antique bookseller (a trade he learned from Sue’s father) barely managing. Finally, when his old life crumpled up and disappeared into ashes, and he closed shop, when he was ready to hit the road to try something new, while poring over the maps, he told himself, I’ll be passing by Rusty Mehta’s college town, I could just drop in on him—for old times’ sake. Not a bad idea to look up old friends and acquaintances at this stage in one’s life.